Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I am excited about Clojure

blog.txus.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 173 posts

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#161

Post by mattgreenrocks »

JackMorgan wrote: post #150
chongli wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

though one has to compare apples and apples. experienced programmer vs inexperienced programmer is not fair. Oh, definitely. I just feel that far too many people focus on programming languages that are good for beginners without really thinking about them from an experienced programmer's perspective. What may be good for a beginner can often be terrible for an expert. What may be hard to understand for a beginner can…

I'd guess that is because most developers ARE beginners, right up till they retire/career shift. If we were even half experts, maybe that would change, but in a field where "anyone can be a developer" you will see a long tail of low skill.

Not sure why you were downvoted.

Industry routinely degrades skill and experience in favor of "just ship." New frameworks are continually churned out with the implicit promise that they'll fix everything (except their own lack of composition). Custom development is viewed as expensive when someone else can come along and paste several libs together, then apply duct tape to hold it all together. Domain modeling is viewed as esoteric. Testing is still hotly debated.

...I don't want to go on.

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#163

Post by flopsey »

chongli wrote: post #135
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could argue that for most people, it is only when they start bumping into the limits of the beginner's tool that they see the point of the more advanced tool.

I think this is a very limiting approach to life. It leaves one open to the Blub Paradox[0] (or more generally the Dunning-Kruger effect[1]). My personal approach is to keep an open mind and assume that there's always a better way to do something than what I am doing now. Edit : [0] http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect

As a new programmer I'd say there's an aspect that you're ignoring. The need to take reasonable steps, and to know if not your limitations at least where you stand.

You want to take the next step that has enough familiar aspects that you can acclimate reasonably quickly and build non-trivial programs (the fun part) in a reasonable amount of time. But also different enough that you're exposed to new concepts and new ways of thinking about programming, and also to have access to a more powerful language.

Simply diving head first into a powerful but completely foreign language might not be the best way. Coding can be as frustrating as it is rewarding. And there's something to be said for trying to maximize the rewards and minimizing the frustrations.

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#164

Post by chongli »

flopsey wrote: post #163
chongli wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a very limiting approach to life. It leaves one open to the Blub Paradox[0] (or more generally the Dunning-Kruger effect[1]). My personal approach is to keep an open mind and assume that there's always a better way to do something than what I am doing now. Edit : [0] http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect

As a new programmer I'd say there's an aspect that you're ignoring. The need to take reasonable steps, and to know if not your limitations at least where you stand. You want to take the next step that has enough familiar aspects that you can acclimate reasonably quickly and build non-trivial programs (the fun part) in a reasonable amount of time. But also different enough that you're exposed to new concepts and new w…

What better way to know your limitations than to seriously challenge yourself? I taught my friend to program in Haskell and while he struggled early on he found it incredibly rewarding. Since then he's found it extremely easy to learn other programming languages, despite their extensive differences from Haskell.

There's also a lot to be said for habit-forming. Imperative languages teach you a lot of habits and cause you to develop assumptions that might actually make it harder to learn a language as different as Haskell. This makes the concept of "taking steps" in your growth as a programmer a nonlinear one. Some languages might even hurt your ability in the long run.

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#165

Post by ivank »

mduerksen wrote: post #114
wtetzner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've noticed is that the JVM startup time is actually pretty small. What's slow is waiting for Clojure to bootstrap itself.

JVM Feature Request: The ability to preserve a complete JVM state (in this case with loaded Clojure stuff) and quickly start from there. Does anybody know if something like that is possible/already exists?

I have used http://criu.org/ on Ubuntu 14.04 to checkpoint and restore a Java process running a Clojure nREPL server. It took 480 ms to checkpoint a 128MB process and 213 ms to restore on a 2.4ghz E5645.

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#166

Post by vorg »

zck wrote: post #111
seacious wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having to memorize an operator precedence table makes me more than willing to give up syntactic sugar. This is one of the things that I dislike most about haskell. I wish liskell or one of the other projects trying to bring S-expressions to haskell had taken off.

There's a common complaint in this thread that is basically "just write your code better, then it'll be readable." There's also a common praise of Haskell that says that its type system eliminates entire classes of errors. It's not accepted by people who use Haskell that "if you use another language and just write your code better, you don't need a type system." Having to explicitly indicate the precedence of operato…

The original infix operators and their precedences were natural to reason about...

  * /
  + -
  = !=
  &&
  ||
Of course you can always use an infix macro in Clojure, e.g. http://data-sorcery.org/2010/05/14/infix-math/

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#167

Post by JackMorgan »

seacious wrote: post #44
astine wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the neat thing about Lisp-style macros. You have to sacrifice a little bit of the syntactical sugar that you are used to in most languages, but in return you have the ability to add almost any possible construct to the language natively. It makes it much easier to extend the language as you don't need to hack an interpreter written in C or Java. Half of the core language is already written in macros.

Not having to memorize an operator precedence table makes me more than willing to give up syntactic sugar. This is one of the things that I dislike most about haskell. I wish liskell or one of the other projects trying to bring S-expressions to haskell had taken off.

There _was_ a project to add s-exprs to Haskell?! Hopes raised and dashed in the same five seconds! I'm a seasoned lisper learning Haskell, and trying to figure out when this parameter will go where is driving me crazy. "No you stupid compiler, I'm passing this to that, not the other way arrrg!"

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#168

Post by JackMorgan »

scott_s wrote: post #53
lectrick wrote: post #32

I am a Ruby guy torn between diving into Haskell or Clojure. Help! Every time I get excited about one feature of one (ClojureScript) I learn the other has something equivalent or potentially better (Haste). One thing that has put me off on Clojure is 1) the ugly as hell JVM stacktraces, 2) hitting the wall of the number system results in nasty JVM errors if you are used to Ruby's trivial (to the developer at least) h…

General advice: don't let the desire to learn the "right" thing prevent you from learning, period. Eventually, it's better to just make a choice and dive in, then to spend more time trying to figure out which one is "better".

Absolutely learn both! Make sure you learn macros well (I suggest Let Over Lambda) and Haskell's powerful type system. I know Clojure and macros pretty well, but learning Haskell the last couple months has been incredible. And then learn Forth, J, Prolog, do SICP in Scheme, etc. ;)

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#169

Post by JackMorgan »

tomp wrote: post #71

> With Clojure your editor (be it Vim, Emacs, Light Table...) is permanently connected to a live REPL. You continually develop, test and modify functions with subsecond feedback. Continuously. Can anyone explain or point me in a direction where I can learn how the above functionality is actually used and useful? I keep hearing about live-editing/hot-reloading, and in theory I believe it must be very useful, but I can…

If you check out our meetup [1], we do Google Hangouts based demos of this in emacs as part of our SICP study group. It's all free and we are happy to help in person if you are in the Philly area.

[1] http://www.meetup.com/Clojadelphia/

Re: Why I am excited about Clojure

#170

Post by Myrmornis »

lectrick wrote: post #32

I am a Ruby guy torn between diving into Haskell or Clojure. Help! Every time I get excited about one feature of one (ClojureScript) I learn the other has something equivalent or potentially better (Haste). One thing that has put me off on Clojure is 1) the ugly as hell JVM stacktraces, 2) hitting the wall of the number system results in nasty JVM errors if you are used to Ruby's trivial (to the developer at least) h…

Here's a serious downside of Haskell:

https://github.com/jwiegley/github/issues/25

Experienced and skilled developers (wiegley's open source work includes ledger and great contributions to emacs org-mode), and the task is to make the API client's base URL configurable. Should be trivial. And yet it descends into farcical stuff about whether they need to introduce a new github monad or to "abstract over a type class". It seems like the purity was really getting in their way. The issue was never solved. I may be cherry picking an example which serves to parody Haskell, but for me that example is really off putting.

Post reply on HN